Companies like AT&T,1 T-Mobile,2 Verizon3 and Comcast4 have all recently introduced programs that favor some online services over others by exempting them from their customers’ monthly data caps, a practice known as zero-rating. By discriminating against sources of content that aren’t exempted, zero-rating jeopardizes the free and open nature of the Internet.

Zero-rating isn’t just a threat to Net Neutrality in the United States. Just this week, India banned zero-rating after a long battle with Facebook over Facebook’s efforts to provide free access to Facebook.com and a small selection of other websites, which would have severely limited the Internet experience of hundreds of millions of people.5

Zero-rating gives a small number of corporations too much power to shape the Internet that is available to users, and it discourages innovation by making it more difficult for smaller players in the market to compete.

The FCC is looking into concerns about zero-rating right now and has requested information from some of the companies employing the practice,6 but it hasn’t yet taken action to stop to zero-rating. It took millions of us speaking out to win Net Neutrality protections. We can’t afford to let companies use zero-rating to undermine them.